Collective Spirit Podcast
First Peoples Fund presents the Collective Spirit® podcast. The Collective Spirit moves each of us to stand up and make a difference, to pass on ancestral knowledge, and simply extend a hand of generosity. The Collective Spirit podcast features Native artists and culture bearers who discuss the power of Indigenous art and culture. The Collective Spirit® podcast is produced by First Peoples Fund, whose mission is to honor and support Indigenous artists and culture bearers through grant-making initiatives, culturally rooted programming, and training & mentorship. Learn more at www.firstpeoplesfund.org
Collective Spirit Podcast
S2E3: Chanelle Gallagher (Ojibwe)
Join us as we learn more about 2023 Artist in Business Leadership Fellow Chanel Gallagher (Ojibwe), who dared to swap her career in social work for her passion for pottery. Chanel's story, rich with the power of embracing her Indigenous roots and reconnecting with the earth through clay, will inspire and enlighten you. This episode will debunk age-old misconceptions about Ojibwe pottery, immersing you in the compelling history of Indigenous art.
I want to interact with the world in a different way. I don't want to be a colonized social worker that diagnoses someone with a mental health disorder that was plated by non-native people. I want to work with clay and our people and I want to use the way I'm in a sustainable way and share that.
Speaker 2:First People's Fund presents the Collective Spirit Podcast. The Collective Spirit moves each of us to stand up and make a difference, to pass on ancestral knowledge and simply extend a hand of generosity. The Collective Spirit Podcast features Native artists and culture bearers who discuss the power of Indigenous art and culture.
Speaker 1:Hello everybody. My name is White Cloud Woman. I'm from Malax, where Ojibwe people here in Ishtenabbe, which is all across the Great Lakes, I'm a part of the Bullhead Clan, my English name is Chanel Gallagher and my artistic medium is ceramics. When I was 18, I moved to North Carolina for college. I first discovered clay at Warren Wilson College and the first time I touched the Wabagon, which is the Ojibwe word for clay, there was this sense of this nostalgic coming home, like I've done this before. Oftentimes we hear this as blood memory. Sometimes we talk about it with historical trauma, but I think that there's more positive things that we as Indigenous people have inherently in blood memory. So when I first touched that clay when I was 18, there was something very spiritual that happens with me, with the earth, and because of that I didn't think that I could do it as a profession. I'm doing this because it makes my heart sing and that I feel joyful doing it. I'm not working as a social worker anymore because I feel this drive to create and work with the Wabagon.
Speaker 1:For the last 10 years I was working as a therapist in the Minneapolis community. My specialty would be more of a non-directive experiential psychodynamic, so working with people in art therapy, play therapy. My last job was at Homeward Bound, which is a shelter here in South Minneapolis for Native American adults. I was the clinical director there for a few years building out their mental health program. So we had opened up the first shelter in the state of Minnesota specifically for adult Native people. That was my last job, so really working with Native people in a way that they want to work, because with a lot of these manualized treatments people have to adhere to a clinical program and I know that our people don't necessarily want to be told what to do.
Speaker 1:I worked with a lot of children doing experiential play therapy. I worked at an Ojibwe Dakota language immersion school right here on the South Side called Bidote. I would work with kids doing clay therapy and oftentimes they would gravitate towards art or some sort of experiential medium like xantra therapy. We had modeling clay in our therapeutic room. When I was with them in the experiential play therapy room I reflected on what they wanted to do when they would go to the modeling clay or the sand tray or if they wanted to paint.
Speaker 1:I was able to see healing in a different way with kids as a therapist. But you don't have enough time to do the real work that you want to do with kids. That's why I left the field about a year ago, because what I really want to do is to open up a center here in Minneapolis and Minnesota McCoy Jay that can combine healing and the artistic mediums so that our people can go to a place right here in South Minneapolis and they don't have to be diagnosed with a mental health disorder to have help or to have healing. They can go to a place and know that they're accepted, no matter how they come through those doors. I had to leave my profession a year ago because my idea is to do it with clay. I think that there's a real natural, spiritual thing that happens when we touch the earth and then make something from the earth. There's a lot of power in that. That's for a year later I'm doing all my own firings.
Speaker 1:I mix all my own glazes. I learned how to make my own studio. Now I think the social work degree is going to help me down the road when I want to open the center here in Minneapolis. Due to colonization, there are people that believe that the Ojibwe people in the Shinabé didn't work with pottery. That's what I was told when I was younger and I took that as a fact because someone told me that it didn't make sense that we didn't work with Wabagon the clay, because that comes from the earth. There's clay everywhere in the state of Minnesota, all across the Great Lakes. There's this beautiful, beautiful, rich clay. In the North Shore, gichigami and river has this gorgeous clay. I started listening to my intuition, to my blood memory, and I started realizing that of course we worked with clay. You know, tribes across Turtle Island have always been connected to the clay and to the land, and so in the last couple weeks I've been going up to my reservation and I've been foraging wild clay and I've been talking to our elders up there.
Speaker 1:I had the opportunity to go to the Science Museum here in St Paul, minnesota. There's an anthropologist there that has a private collection of woodland pottery and he showed it to me last Friday. This is pottery from our people here in this region, and so I was able to see some of the vessels in the shards and it's malax pottery. There's different kinds of patterns that we use. This is pre-contact, pre-colonization. Sure enough, the anthropologists I told them people have told me that we didn't do that and he said that's so interesting, but what did you guys cook with then?
Speaker 1:First People's Fund has solidified that to be an artist is really an act of courage, every single day To wake up and not have a nine to five job. You don't get a check at the end of two weeks or once a month or every week. You kind of have to have faith that what you're doing every day. There's a reason why you do it and I think the reason is because you love it. But I think, with First People's Fund, meeting all the other fellows, seeing the community spirit awardees and seeing and hearing people's lifelong commitment to their culture and to their art, the fact that they do it because they know they need to do it, to revitalize our stories, our ceremonies, the way we use resources from the earth in a more sustainable way there's so many teachings in being an artist that for me, it's more of a way of life.
Speaker 1:I want to interact with the world in a different way. I don't want to be a colonized social worker that diagnoses someone with a mental health disorder that was created by non-native people. I want to work with clay and our people, and I want to use the land in a sustainable way and share that. It's about being one with the earth, one with our family, one with our community. So it's been a challenge to call myself an artist, for sure, but the clay has always been connected to me, and the people as young as two all the way up to 90, can make something with clay.
Speaker 1:I love that, and so my project that I proposed was to buy my own kiln and open my own studio where native people can come and work for free, so trying to create more access and equity in the contemporary field of ceramics, especially here in Minneapolis, because we have a large urban Indian population and when you go to these communal studios you don't see any native people. I hope to revitalize Woodland Pottery, especially for the Ojibwe and the Shnabe people here in the state of Minnesota, so that we can learn our techniques, similar to the Kueblos down in the Southwest, they've tapped all of their beautiful pottery traditions, and up here we've kind of lost it, and so my goal is to revitalize that, and then it may take 20 years. This may be my life's work, and I'm okay with that.
Speaker 2:The Collective Spirit podcast is produced by First Peoples Fund, whose mission is to honor and support indigenous artists and culture bearers through grant-making initiatives, culturally-rooted programming, and training and mentorship. Learn more at FirstPeoplesFundorg.